


We'll be all Okay

by JadedFalling



Category: 9-1-1 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Future, Cuddling & Snuggling, Domestic, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Married Evan "Buck" Buckley/Eddie Diaz, Nightmares, Sleepy Cuddles
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-09
Updated: 2021-03-09
Packaged: 2021-03-15 16:13:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,163
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29936004
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JadedFalling/pseuds/JadedFalling
Summary: Do I even need a reason to write Buck and Eddie cuddling after one of them has a nightmare? Domestic Bliss AU where a few years down the line they're happily married with two more kids
Relationships: Evan "Buck" Buckley/Eddie Diaz (9-1-1 TV)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 110





	We'll be all Okay

**Author's Note:**

> Eddie has a nightmare and Buck is right there ready to pull him away from it and into sleepy cuddles. He knows what Eddie needs even when he's barely awake.
> 
> Title taken from [Lemniscate (The Place Between Sleeping And Awake)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYPcgCtdP5A) by Crywolf
> 
> ps barely edited it so ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

Eddie wakes with neither gasp nor flail.

His heart throbs below his aching jaw and he’s sucking in heavy, panting breaths through clenched teeth and dry nose. Slowly, through the grey fuzz of his open eyes, the light on the ceiling resolves itself into the soft, pale glow of the nightlight casting blue-almost-white light around abstracted shadows from the cover where it’s plugged in near the door to the hall. He’s shaking. His bones are hot iron, joints filled with sand. His muscles are melting around the blaze. The sheets stick to his contrastingly cool, clammy skin. He wants to roll away, fall onto the cooler floor. His limbs refuse to cooperate.

“ ‘ddie?”

It’s the softest mumble, muffled through cotton and artificial-down filling. The fist squeezing his ribs is already easing its grip just from the familiarity. His wrist twitches and he turns his hand as far around as he can from where it’s flopped uselessly at his side, grappling for a tether and finding it in the hook of his fingers under the leg of Buck’s boxer-briefs.

Buck’s shifting next to him and Eddie doesn’t even realize he’s squeezed his dry – why so  _ dry  _ – eyes shut, trying to loosen his jaw, until a warm palm is clumsily settling over his jaw – thumb narrowly missing his eye and resting at the outside corner – and Buck’s forehead bonks his temple. A nose smooshes into his cheek, and Eddie angles into it with the weight of the hand on the other side.

“Nightmare?” Buck asks and Eddie feels it in the wash of soft breath more than he hears it.

He grunts in answer, still feeling like his jaw is wired shut. He doesn’t even remember what the nightmare was but his heart is a painful drumbeat against his sternum with abject fear fueling it. And below that his stomach is slithering around itself, creating a Gordian Knot that's trying to work its way up his esophagus. Guilt. Helplessness. He aches from toes to top like he had been fighting, struggling against the impressions of blasting dust storms filled with whipping fire, blinding him, ripping away everything he clung to. The harder he fought, the more he lost. Loss. Hollowing scraping Loss.

And then he was awake.

“You’re not there.” Buck’s mouth whispers into the corner of his own. “Y’r here. In L.A. It’s 2023. Chris ‘s down the hall. Asleep. Andie ‘n’ Dahlia ’re in their cribs next door. Listen. The baby monitor.”

Now that it’s been pointed out, Eddie hears the soft humming grunts and little squeaks of a baby shifting in their sleep from the bedside table.

Home.

Without even being aware that it was happening, his breaths have slowed. He finds he can smell the sleep and soap and light clean sweat of Buck’s skin...their fabric softener and hair-oil-shampoo-conditioner scent in the pillowcase under his head.

Buck physically wavers. Eddie’s arm automatically curls up to steady him, landing near his stomach, knuckles brushing over the soft hair growing there.

“Are you here?” Buck asks, tipped more toward his ear after almost losing his tired balance over Eddie. Eddie shoves his arm under Buck’s waist to hold him.

“Yeah,” he heaves. His jaw has softened like butter under the heat of Buck’s hand. His teeth  _ hurt. _ “Yeah, I’m here.”

Buck smears a sleepy approximation of a kiss to the curve of his bare shoulder. 

“Good.”

His palm slides up Eddie’s face, fingers carding through his hair. He’s succumbing, Eddie can tell.

It’s no wonder with how exhausted they both were after coming home, barely able to check in on Christopher’s schooling and extracurriculars after dinner together, and get the twins bathed and down before taking turns stumbling through their own nightly routine and falling into bed. It’s no wonder how Eddie got trapped in a nightmare after all these years, too exhausted to wake before it was bad, and too stuck in the whirlpool of emotional drain their shift had sucked from him.

Eddie turns his head and busses his own trembling kiss to the shell of Buck’s ear, the closest thing he can reach.

“ ‘m here, Eddie.” Buck nuzzles and sighs into Eddie’s neck, squirming closer. “Not goin’ anywhere.”

His hand slides messily down from Eddie’s hair, over his jaw and the line of his neck, the still heaving (but much, much slower) planes of his chest, to curl around his ribs and up, hooking around the ball of his shoulder to give him a single comforting squeeze. Eddie tries to return it with his noodly arm around Buck.

Buck wiggles a little more, somehow getting himself half on top of Eddie with his own pillow from the other side of the bed half stuffed under the rest of him, head sharing Eddie’s pillow. His leg curls around Eddie’s in a mirror of his arm, and finally the knot in Eddie’s gut dissolves into something jellier.

Eddie had tried a weighted blanket once, shortly after therapy addressed his sometimes-nightmares and occasionally-night-terrors. It made him feel too hot, groggy when trying to wake, and the one time he had a nightmare under it, he struggled under it until he awoke and had to stumble in a panic to a cold shower to drag himself into consciousness and away from the heat and fear and sweat and utter futility he was trapped in.

Maybe he just didn’t have the right type of blanket, the wrong weight, the wrong temperature in his room for it to help him. Or maybe it was stale air, dehydration, a bit of sleep paralysis. Whatever it was, it wasn’t for him and he didn’t have the time or money or— to try to get it right, so he folded it up and stuffed it in the closet with the rest of their sheets and spare blankets.

But with the way Buck had settled on top of him, not fully, but enough for Eddie to feel his solid warmth and weight holding him there, in the present...

With the way Eddie felt his breaths, his heart, the whisper of his bare skin on Eddie’s chest, his arms, his calf where Buck had nestled the arch of his foot...

The way Eddie felt the last of his adrenaline draining rapidly from every cell of his body, his eyelids getting heavier, his breaths sighing from him, his skin warmer, and his muscles steadier when he reached with his free hand for the outside of Buck’s bare thigh...

This was what that blanket was meant to resemble.

“ ‘m righ’ here, ‘ddie, love y’u,” Buck mumbles once more, breath tickling the bottom of Eddie’s chin and the line of his neck, the curve of his shoulder.

The corner of Eddie’s mouth twitches.

His head sinks further into his pillow, shared with Buck now.

His fingers curl loosely around Buck, holding but not gripping.

His face slackens.

He has everything he needs, no fight necessary.

He’s right there.

...right here...

“ ‘m home.”

**Author's Note:**

> Andie and Dahlia are fraternal boy/girl twins that Eddie and Buck went halfsies on with a surrogate in a buy-one-get-one-free situation they weren't expecting. Andie is short for Alejandro in the tradition of Eddie being short for Edmundo. Christopher is the one who suggested their names start with A and D because then as a family they'd be ABCDE and he thought that was hilarious. (When they eventually get a dog because he knows he's like this - close to getting one, their name will start with an F.)
> 
> Anyway. This was just something that got stuck in my head and I needed to get it out because it kept circling around the drain in my head when trying to sleep at night. Hope you enjoyed!  
> ♥


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